I have recently been in a number of conversations with people who have told me that they feel overwhelmed; they articulate that they have “too many things on their plate.” In speaking with these friends, it is as if they feel that they are caught in a vortex of tasks and relationship demands…and the demands have become endless.

The question that has come to mind is this, “What happened to the word ‘No’”?

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men [and women] are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Recently I spent a couple days away with family in a location where we had limited cell phone and internet connections. In fact, much of the time there was no wireless connectivity at all.

And that was an experience that reminded me just how “addicted” I have become to continuously checking my phone and internet communication tools. At first I was checking my smart phone every few minutes; after a while the frequency shifted to every few hours, and eventually, I sort of just gave up glancing at my phone at all. It was instructive.

Last week I pointed out that one of the behaviors that can be challenging when leading a team is the characteristic of passivity with a member of a team. In defining this topic, I clarified that passivity is, “The failure to take action when called upon to do so.”

One of the tricking things to address when leading a team is the characteristic of "passivity" with a member of a team.

So what is passivity? According to the online source, Dictionary.com, passivity is, “…the state or condition of being passive.” Behavior whereby a person is, “not participating readily or actively…” We could rephrase this as,

But wait. Although everyone is discussing last week’s game between the Packers and the Seahawks, we simply must pause to highlight the obvious: persistence pays. As Russell Wilson and his Seahawks team has demonstrated, the secret to a winning team: never give up.

"I've never thrown four interceptions in a game," Wilson said. "But I'd rather do it that way. If we were going to go down, I was going to go down swinging."